samesecks

Apparently the gay clergy convened a synod to debate a highly abstruse point of theological doctrine for the purpose of confirming Peter Thiel’s excommunication. The agreement they settled on is that while Thiel might engage in “gay sex,” he’s not truly “gay” in his heart and soul by virtue of his reactionary politics. No word yet as to whether he might be permitted to use his tech fortune to buy some indulgences. But to the superstitious medieval mind, Thiel’s sins are so grievous that his evil spirit still possesses a company he sold more than a decade ago, prompting church officials to urge lay worshipers to boycott it until a professional exorcism can be performed.

If you’ve ever wanted to see the arrhythmic, worm-infested heart of identity politics, there it is — the group giveth identity, and the group taketh away. Black conservatives and anti-feminist, pro-life women nod and smile ruefully. Identity only counts within the boundaries of the party line. According to the Great Chain of Intersectional Being, straight white males, a monolithic group, are at the top. Everyone else is defined by degrees of alienation and oppression, the foundational concepts of the left-wing worldview. If you happen to reside further up the chain among the clouds of privilege, your only hope of being provisionally tolerated by the professionally oppressed clerisy is by engaging in public displays of obsequious flattery, maudlin pity, and anguished self-loathing. Still, however devoted your efforts, you may rest assured that a dossier is nevertheless being kept on you for use when you become inconvenient or tiresome. If, as an officially recognized victim, you deny that your agency has been completely compromised by structural factors far beyond your control or understanding, or you fail to display sufficient resentment against your oppressors, you, too, will be cast out into the outer darkness.

Update: And here I thought I was exaggerating for effect!

The article headline itself goes with “tolerate,” while the URL uses “shun,” but still, the message is the standard progressive party line. “Tolerance” means that conservative-leaning people need to put up with things that bother or offend them. “Diversity” means that everyone looks different in superficial ways while marching in ideological lockstep. For me, the funniest part is Oremus wrinkling his nose in disgust about a book Thiel co-wrote, which he describes as “noxious” and “as un-PC as it gets.” I don’t know, I haven’t read it, but judging by the description, Oremus sounds like quite a delicate flower, which, I suppose, is all too typical of the hothouse environment he and his fellow progressives sequester themselves in.

I can’t help but wonder also if this public display of raw masculinity isn’t also a reaction to the relative decline in male power in American life and culture. As girls beat boys in school, and as women increasingly beat men in college, and as women out-pace men in vast swathes of the economy, and as old patterns of allegedly sexist male culture are policed and patrolled with ever-greater assiduity, the beard and the old-school manliness of the lumbersexual become new ways to express masculinity which cannot be denigrated or dismissed as sexist. It’s a way to reclaim manliness without running afoul of the new prophets of gender justice.

It’s s strange feeling to be ambling along for however many years, just doing my unremarkable, un-self-conscious thing, only to wake up one day and discover that certain tastemakers and media outlets have suddenly pronounced it to be a thing. Complete with an ideological stance, even! I knew there was a reason I kept those flannel shirts from twenty years ago; I just thought it was because they were so soft and comfortable and made to last.

Me, I was devastated years ago by the loss of my youngest dog to lymphoma, and in my grief, I happened to let a few weeks go by without shaving. As I returned to equilibrium, I decided that I greatly preferred the way I looked with a beard and decided to keep it, and so I have done. I wish I could pretend it had a more exciting genesis than that, but at least I’ll still like the way I look with it long after the politically-bearded have moved on to different fashions.

And what about that suddenly-fashionable appearance of mine? Well, according to the correspondent who recently sent me this picture from a beard site, I bear a “striking resemblance” to this guy:

Hmm. Well, the build and hairstyle are pretty much the same. My eyes are normally a little wider than that. I’m not as visibly tattooed, though, and my hair is a blend of ash-blond and light brown rather than red. And he’s probably a month or two ahead of me in the beard-length department. But yeah, I could probably strike a very similar pose, so I’ll accept it and be flattered by the comparison! I mean, that’s one handsome dude. Why, I could possibly even go a little gay for a fine-looking fellow like that. What? I could. Just a little bit, you know.

Howard: If I don’t get some action soon, I’m going gay.Vince: What? You?Howard: What’s so funny about that?Vince: You are the LEAST gay person I’ve ever met.Howard: I COULD go gay. You’ve got me all wrong. I could go gay like THAT, sir!Vince: You can’t just go gay! It’s not like buying a ladder!

Tolerance is not just a low bar; it actively undercuts robust integration and social belonging by allowing the warp and woof of anti-gay animus to go unchallenged. Tolerance allows us to celebrate (hysterically) the coming out of macho professional athletes as a triumphant sign of liberation rather than a sad commentary on the persistence of the closet and the hold of masculinist ideals. Tolerance allows religious “objections” to queer lives to remain in place, even as it claims that a civilized society leaves its homos alone. Tolerance pushes for marriage equality and simultaneously assures anxious allies that it won’t change their marriages or their lives.

And there you see the crux of the tolerance trap: If an ostensible concession doesn’t challenge straight lives, it’s not very radical, and if it does challenge them, it’s not a concession gays and lesbians will win. The marriage assurances are similar to gay responses to right-wing attacks on queer parents: Researchers and advocates argue that “no harm” is done to our kids, that there is no difference between gay and straight parenting. But couldn’t we imagine the strong case? Shouldn’t we argue, instead, that our progeny would/could grow up with more expansive and creative ways of living gender and sexuality? Shouldn’t we argue that same-sex marriage might make us all think differently about the relationship between domestic life and gender norms and push heterosexuals to examine their stubborn commitment to a gendered division of labor?

Once you sift out all the pomo gender studies-speak, it seems to me that her essay balances uneasily on two contradictory premises. On the one hand, she decries “tolerance” as an ideal because, she claims, it depends on the idea of immutability — if gays are truly “born this way”, then we have to grudgingly tolerate them, even if we aren’t enthused about it. This interpretation might come as a surprise to J.S. Mill, whose classic formulation of tolerance as a liberal ideal did not depend upon a notion of people being born to think a certain way. At any rate, as is typical of radical leftist perspectives, she doesn’t like the fact that “tolerance” implies a power imbalance. In a truly just world, no one should ever have to beg for concessions from anyone!

But then some of her complaints seem to be those of an aging radical unhappy that a new generation is content to accept queerness as just another insignificant lifestyle choice, rather than being a truly different subculture, forever opposed to the dominant culture’s mores. These damn queer kids today, they’re just content to be allowed to get married, join the army, and be proportionately represented among TV sitcom characters! Well, I just have two pieces of free advice, which are worth every penny: one, as long as you’re wishing upon a star for things to be different than they are, don’t forget to finish with “…and a pony.” And two, if you’re really into fetishizing intractable differences between cultures and subcultures, you might not want to be so scornful toward an ideal that takes for granted an imperfect state of affairs in which deep, important differences will always exist between people, and seeks to create the conditions for them to exist together without serious conflict. If the pragmatic reality is that you will always be a minority, both demographically and philosophically, disparaging the ideal of tolerance for being less than perfect is a bit like sawing through the branch you’re sitting on.

Mozilla says, “While painful, the events of the last week show exactly why we need the web. So all of us can engage freely in the tough conversations we need to make the world better.” Again, Mozilla’s actions will undercut tough conversations by making fewer people willing to engage in them. If you believe that an open, robust public discourse makes the world better, as they purport to, they’ve made the world worse. This action is a betrayal of their values, not a reflection of them.

I thought this part was particularly funny. Not just the fact that, in practice, this “we need to have a conversation” trope is a favorite squishy saying of people who would rather do anything but have a conversation, but the idea that the web has somehow improved the quality of our conversations. This is exactly why we need the web, for the unlikely chance we might ever be able to talk like adults!

Anyway, unless you count the few times I’ve been called a fag for having long hair or being taciturn and introverted, I don’t know what it’s like to be gay, obviously. Maybe it’s not for me to say how anyone should feel or act about a situation like this. Choire Sicha would seem to agree there, but Andrew Sullivan is also gay, and he vehemently disagrees with this whole episode, so I think they cancel each other out, leaving the floor to me, right? I’m pretty sure that’s how this works.

Though it may be easy for me to say, I still think these are valid philosophical principles in general: Be magnanimous in victory as much as possible. Don’t seek to settle scores or humiliate people for having chosen the wrong side of a fight. Be wary of acquiring a taste for ostracizing and exiling people who opposed you. When you’re racking up one court victory after another — the sorts of institutional achievements that matter — you can afford to ignore some ignorant reality TV star. When public opinion is decisively swinging in your favor, you can refrain from vindictively punishing people who pose no actual threat just because you can. When you have substance, you don’t need symbolism.

But you get what he’s saying: Hip-hop has traditionally been an unfriendly place to gay people. “Same Love” was released in 2012, but it didn’t break till this year, after Macklemore and Ryan Lewis scored their career-delivering hits, “Thrift Shop” and “Can’t Hold Us.” Had it been written later, it very well could have been different. It’s been a watershed year in terms of hip-hop’s relationship to homosexuality. It’s harder and harder to make the case that “hip-hop hates me.”

Finally. It’s about damned time. Away with the fear. Down with the shame. An end to the living of a double life, worried about what would happen if the neighbors or one’s social circle were to find out. No more channeling that self-loathing into venomous aggression toward those who are brave enough to be out and proud. No more need to bear the insulting jokes, the insensitive questions, the utter indignity of having to pretend that Frank Ocean is a talented artist when all you care about is his political significance. Stop tangling yourselves up in painful knots of self-doubt and guilt! Say it loud, and say it proud: “We’re white progressives, and we love hip-hop and rap!” There’s nothing to be ashamed of anymore!

Oh, yeah, and I’m sure gay people will see this as a positive thing too.

Having just enjoyed a riotous laugh at J. Bryan Lowder’s attempt to preserve the Platonic ideal of the concept of privilege, it would only be fair to acknowledge one of his better efforts:

But I would like to take a moment to reflect upon how troubling this and other recent dust-ups regarding some giant corporation’s “feelings” about the gays really are on closer inspection. I’m by no means the first person to say this, but being offended (or for that matter, flattered) by an entity whose sole purpose is to sell things, maybe to you or maybe to someone else, is to unavoidably endorse and enliven the insidious concept of corporate personhood. Barilla is not your enemy and Absolut is not your friend; they are just businesses with PR departments that are at different points along the road toward realizing that influential, “taste-maker” minority groups are worth courting, both for direct patronage and easy image-boost-by-association. It’s unfortunate, I guess, that Barilla (or at least Guido Barilla) is behind the times on this matter, but the earnest anger I’m seeing online about that fact is perplexing. I mean, are you really so starved for approval that you need it to come packaged with pasta?

I realize that the previous paragraph probably makes me sound like an Occupy Wall Street, anti-capitalism type, which is really not the case. My concern with this increasingly common “the gays are for/against X corporation” trope is far more basic than that: I simply resent being told I should change my shopping list every time some old C-suite dude runs his out-of-touch mouth or offers to sponsor my next parade.

Ahahaha. Now, we already knew Hamilton Nolan is a goddamned moron, and we already knew that Gawker’s brand of progressive woo-girl politics is as superficial as its audience, but shut my mouth and palm my face, this do beat all. Apparently, it never occurred to our progressive heroes while agitating for the overturn of DADT that they were, in fact, agitating for people to have the opportunity to be psychologically broken down in order to be rebuilt as perfect, unquestioning killing machines. Tugging uncomfortably at the collar, a strained expression, a finger held aloft: “This seems a bit, well, retrograde.” You don’t say.

It’s always amusing to see naïve campus progressivism run face-first into a reality-based brick wall; it tickles my slapstick funny bone. But there’s also an unpleasant dissonance in considering the kind of person who can blithely accept the idea of humans being shaped into lethal weapons while blanching at the thought that the process of shaping them thusly might involve some impolitic language. Like George Carlin said about rules of combat, it seems just a way to reassure ourselves that we’re quite civilized even as we devote our efforts to signing up as many people as possible to this institution of mass killing. Faced with the grave significance of war, presented with a pile of corpses, what kind of procedural mindset massages away the cramps of conscience by consulting a properly ticked-off checklist? Well, let’s see — proper declaration of hostilities, signed in the right place, mm-hmm; official uniform, name tag clearly displayed, yep; cause of death: regulation military weaponry, legally obtained, properly registered, good; aaaaand….nope, doesn’t appear anyone was called a faggot or a raghead in the process. All righty, everything looks good here, carry on.

One of the things that nauseated me during those wasted years spent reading the political blogosphere was the presence of so many amateur spin doctors, those process-minded moral homunculi who only thought in terms of optics and marketing, divorced from considerations of value. The Democrats were the brand, and achieving maximum market share was the goal. Repealing the ban on gays in the military looks to be polling well, so let’s go with it! Meta-questions about the worthiness of any such goals would only confuse them, like a Roomba stuck in the corner between the bookcase and the nightstand. Vroom, bonk. Vroom, bonk. Should gays or anyone else care about being discriminated against by such an institution? What about the implications of seeing the world’s mightiest death-dealing colossus as first and foremost a vehicle for job training and career advancement? Vroom, extending civil rights, bonk. Vroom, the most important election of our time, bonk.

People who can overlook gruesome reality with the help of sanitized language are not to be trusted.

People look at an issue like marriage equality, and the first inclination is to set prescriptive norms. We should do something, the justices should rule a certain way, you should support a given cause. But based on everything that we know about our brains and their bafflingly strong desires to fit in with the crowd, the best way to convince people that they should care about an issue and get involved in its advocacy isn’t to tell people what they should do — it’s to tell them what other people actually do.

And you know what will accomplish that? That’s right. Everyone on Facebook making their opinions on the issue immediately, graphically, demonstrably obvious. That is literally all that it takes to create a descriptive norm: Publicly acknowledging your belief along with the thousands of other people who are also publicly acknowledging theirs.

So, no. The fact that you’ve replaced that picture of yourself mugging for the camera with a red square and an equal sign will not cause Justice Kennedy to bang his gavel or stomp his foot and say that he’s come to a final decision on the matter, and that it’s all because of your new profile picture. Changing your Facebook image will not have a direct impact on our legislation.

But a widespread descriptive norm implying that it is socially acceptable to advocate for same-sex marriage and that most people in contemporary American society seem to be pro-marriage-equality? Now that just might.

Way back in the day, I remember reading a newsletter from the people behind Vegan Outreach, in which they outlined their plan for the veganization of the world. You see, if each person reading this could simply convince five other people to become vegan, and then each of those five people could convince five more apiece, well, you get the idea. The whole world would be vegan by the year such-and-such. Of course, the obvious objection that even I was able to articulate at the time was that, in real life, most people’s social circles are tightly constrained enough so that without some seriously die-hard witnessing to hostile audiences, most of these activists were just going to end up talking to each other. The circles expand outward to a certain point, and then the walls just become higher.

The Spleen: What? What are you talking about? You lifted a bus once!The Blue Raja: Yes, precisely! That story’s legend’ry!Mr. Furious: Yeah… It was really more of a…
[waves hand sideways]Mr. Furious: … a push, really, than a lift.The Shoveler: That still takes INCREDIBLE super-human strength.The Blue Raja: Indeed, it does! To push an entire bus out of the way.Mr. Furious: Well, actually, the driver kinda had his foot on the accelerator… JUST in the beginning; just to get it going. Then it actually was me. But he kinda…

In the case of gay marriage, the driver’s had his foot on the accelerator for a few decades now, and it’s more than a bit absurd to see people desperate to justify their clicktivism by reframing the story around the “push” they gave it. Social conformity and peer pressure can certainly help solidify gains, but those gains themselves require a lot more than just bumper-sticker proclamations of belief.

I almost did a spit-take when I saw that above the byline of my old friend Mary Elizabeth Williams. Is she actually going to take a strong stance in opposition to the progressive outing mafia, I wondered?

My surge of optimism was short-lived, as the column turned out to fit the usual MEW template: on the one hand, on the other, possibly this, maybe that, views differ, gosh, who can say. Hell, the headlines are probably written by SEO copywriters rather than the columnists anyway, so maybe I can’t even give her credit for that.

But since she (or some staff monkey) asked, I’ll answer: no. No, the fact that you’ve paid money to see Travolta play various fictional characters in movies does not buy you access to the details of his private life. The same applies to any celebrity, for that matter. You don’t have the right to press-gang him or anyone else you suspect of being closeted, with or without good reason, into service in the It Gets Better navy. I mean, what, he’s not important enough as an individual to allow him control over how he presents his own public identity, but he’s nonetheless individually valuable to the gay liberation movement because his coming out would mean the world to, uh… some confused, small-town teenager who just happens to be a rabid Welcome Back, Kotter fan? How does that work? Is there a specific quota of out-and-proud celebrities that we’re aiming for, at which point the homophobes will realize they’re outnumbered and surrender?

It’s amusingly ironic, given as how bullying has been such a recent cause célèbre among the same social-media set, but at what point do shitbags like Louis Peltzman achieve self-awareness and realize that they aren’t any better, no matter how noble the ostensible cause?

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.